Once upon a time there lived a boy who had way too high of hopes for his deranged girlfriend. This boy, who most people refer to as Potato Foot, was a handsome fella, and played a lot of video games. His girlfriend liked to sit behind him and watch as he played Players Unknown Battleground like a crazed maniac. His girlfriend like to attempt to know what she was talking about, but usually he had to correct her because she is a bit of a ditz.
The Boy was superhuman and could pick up a house and toss it feet, if not miles. The Boy has never tossed a house, but the Girlfriend is pretty sure he could if he wanted to. She has noticed that when the Boy puts his mind to something, he usually achieves it.
The Girlfriend, however, cannot seem to even write a sentence anymore. In the past, she could write && write &&& write, but now, when she opens her laptop, all she finds that she does is stare at a blank Word document. Sometimes she thinks that her ability to write, has gone down the toilet. Just flushed, swirled down and now is in the sewer with all the rest of the crap.
The boy, being his loving boy self, tries to tell the Girlfriend that her writing isn’t crap. But she cannot believe him since he has never read anything she has written. But in his defense, The Girlfriend doesn’t usually share her writing – with him, or the neighbor, or the best friend, or even the cats… especially the cats – those mean little I’m going to judge you animals.
The Girlfriend had so many dreams && sometimes she feels like they were washed into a gutter and now the rats are chewing them. This made her sad – not because her dreams are trash and unrealistic, but because – rats.
The Boy laughs sometimes at how silly the Girlfriend is and thinks and talks and walks and chews and…. Okay, maybe not – it’s not the point. He just seems so perfect, being able to shoot fish in a barrel, but her – nothing. She cannot even fail properly.
The Girlfriend tries to accomplish new things but in the end trashes it to the floor in a small pile of crinkled paper. It’s not that she doesn’t want to achieve greatness, she just doesn’t think she is worthy of it. What makes her better than the next person who wants wonderful things to happen? Her dream is to be a writer of books. She wants to be that person that has a book that touches a soul – even if it is just one.
The Boy is always telling her she can do anything if she puts her mind to it. But the Girlfriend knows you’re supposed to use personal experience and likes and loves and feelings and relationships to build stories off – but what happens when the writer hasn’t done anything to build from? What if the things the writer has been through, they are tired of writing about?
Once in a world she could write and write and write and write about feelings, and experiences and death, but now with her Rainbow and Butterfly mind she wants to write love and happiness and finding a way to smile. She wants to make someone feel as if they’re floating in thin air from just the words she chooses.
But words – what if her words aren’t perfect and her paragraphs are dirty, and her sentences are thirsty? How can a writer have issues with wording and grammar and still write a book that pleases all the senses?
She will ask people, a lot, about ways to write more and their answer is always the same – to write more you need to read more. What happens if you’re in a reading slump and every time you pick up a book you begin yawning and fall asleep? Not because the book is boring but because you just don’t feel like it. Kind of like when people tell you to drink more water, but the more water you drink the more boring the taste is. Then you wonder how people can drink the water because it doesn’t actually have a taste and when they give you some line like it’s refreshing, and you think ‘so is Dr. Pepper if you drink enough of it’.
The Boy, however, doesn’t seem to have these kinds of problems – at least the Girlfriend doesn’t notice this. He laughs things off and carries on his merry way. He grabs controllers and plays video games forgetting troubles for a few. The Girlfriend used to use writing for that – just jump in headfirst and live through characters a life worth living. But does that mean her life isn’t worth living?
She is happy and enjoys life. How many people can say they have fallen in love twice in a lifetime with the same person and finds themselves falling more and more every day? She can. How many people can say that by thirty she would realize that she has lived longer without parents than she did with them? She can. But how many people can say that by nineteen they had figured out exactly what they wanted to do with their life and just needed to put it into action? She can.
Putting it to action is her problem. She has a memory card with thousands of writings – beginnings – no middle and no end. She finds herself sometimes going back and opening her old writings and trying to finish them, but she can’t. There is no ending. Her writing seems to go on forever, but the forever isn’t a good thing, because it turns into crap. Then when she finally does write a full story, whether it is short, middle or long, she shreds it to pieces before she can stop herself and ends up with the dog ate my homework writing that makes no sense at all.
The Boy tries to help her the best way he can by supporting and telling her to start writing and saying how their future could be great – if she would only write more. Finish what she has started and do something great! Greatness, she wonders, was it ever in her future to begin with? People her age seem to have already gotten what they want out of life, family, career, but she sits on her throne staring off into the distance of an unwritten world of greys and whites covering a rainbow that was once thousands of colors.
Where did her colors go? Where can she find the colors to pull them back into her life so the rainbows, and unicorns, and cotton candy comes back into her eyes?
But even in the bleakness of rainbow-less worlds of soggy sandwiches and stale potato chips, she can still find a small hole in the fence and write something. Maybe nothing touching or excellent but something – small and ordinary. She finds her wording sometimes to be dramatic and wholesome and perky. But parts, in the same writing, would be swollen and contemporarily empty.
She blinks back the thoughts of quitting and moves on down the wet pavement to the stop sign and stares emotionless for a while before she turns back around and goes home. Home, a place of solitude and happiness. Home, a place where she can put her feet up and know that no one is judging her, except for maybe her cats. Home, a place she can close doors off to people and things and other worldly beings and pretend she isn’t home. They can knock and ring the doorbell and peak into the windows but all they’ll see is empty space. Home, a place where dreams and aspirations live in the air where they’ll be plucked and hidden in a box deep into the abyss of what is known to her as a closet. The closet holds secrets that sometimes need to be spread around, so people know what they are up to. Cleaning out the closet is a real thing and maybe she needs to open hers wide open so the world can swallow her whole.
She doesn’t know where life will take her if she is barefooted all the time, but she does know wherever it leads, the Boy will follow on the back of a fedora wearing horse with a cape yelling “GO GIRLFRIEND!” She knows out of the whole world that he will be her cheerleader, the one person that she can count on, and know that when it rains, it’ll pour – but he’ll be holding the umbrella getting soaked because his ball cap that he wears backwards doesn’t block the rain.
♥The Barbosphere♥ 